Intelligence and Security Services

John McDonnell Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2013 Westminster Hall

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I welcome what The Guardian has done. It is heroic. The publication of this information has opened up a wide debate. There is talk of treason—Michael White is here, but I want to drag him off to the Tower for being a running dog of the bourgeoisie, not for treason. This is ludicrous. Allegations of treason are being bandied about, but what has actually happened is simply an exposé of what is taking place and what we should have been informed about in terms of parliamentary procedures.

In America, there has been cross-party agreement that the status quo is unacceptable. Obama has set up a full review of surveillance activities and has established a privacy and civil liberties oversight board. The author of the Patriot Act has said that the revealed activity is

“well beyond what the Patriot Act allows.”

The chairperson of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has called for a total review of all intelligence programmes. That is exactly what we are calling for here. Others with experience have also commented. Lord King, the former Secretary of State for Defence and former Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, straightforwardly said:

“Legislation has to keep up to date with all these things and the way people use them. I think it is most important that all the legislation in this area is under regular review.”

Interestingly, he also said that a member of the Opposition should chair the ISC to give it more credibility. Lord Carlile said that

“the current legislation, including the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, should be re- examined and rewritten to fit the current situation.”

The principles of what we are seeking were set out clearly by a former director of GCHQ, Sir David Omand, in a recent Demos report:

“Democratic legitimacy demands that where new methods of intelligence gathering and use are to be introduced they should be on a firm legal basis and rest on parliamentary and public understanding of what is involved, even if the operational details of the sources and methods used must sometimes remain secret.”

All we are asking for is a review and for structures to be put in place based on those principles. The general public also want this debate. A recent ComRes poll for Big Brother Watch found that 71% of people believe a debate about surveillance law is in the public interest. We need to respond to that public opinion, because recent revelations have undermined credibility.

I want to run through several practical suggestions proposed by some independent bodies. I have been moving amendments to the High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill, so I came late to this debate; I am sorry if others have already mentioned them.

The legal opinions used to underpin the ongoing surveillance framework should be published, as the US Government have done. The budget and investigatory capacity of the Intelligence and Security Committee, the interception of communications commissioner and surveillance commissioners should also be published. Is it true that the ISC’s current resource is a retired Metropolitan police officer on a part-time basis?

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal should be reformed so that it is presumed that its hearings should be held in public, that it should state the reasons for reaching its decisions and that its judgments can be appealed in court. We should end the need for Secretaries of State to approve appearances of the heads of agencies before parliamentary Committees and allow agency and service heads to give evidence in public where appropriate. The legal restrictions on British companies publishing transparency reports about surveillance requests should be lifted.

[Rory Stewart]

I support much of what the hon. Gentleman proposes. Does he agree that, as a minimum, we should aim to meet the US standards relating to this kind of activity?

[John McDonnell]

That is exactly my point. Much of our intelligence services are integrated in many respects anyway, so we must ensure a common standard approach. The Americans have said that they are looking at a root-and-branch reform and we need at least to start along that pathway in order to mirror what is happening in the US.

I will be brief as others need to speak, but the other proposal is that we publish details of the use of surveillance powers broken down by agency, rather than the single UK figure currently published, including the scale of international intelligence sharing.

All those proposals are simply practical. In addition, we should enhance whistleblower protection for those who want to come forward from within the services, because that protection clearly seems inadequate at the moment.

Who will lead the reform programme? Does it have to be Parliament? To be frank, and with respect to existing members of the Intelligence and Security Committee and its Chair, having on the ISC and as its Chair former Ministers who were previously responsible for the security services leads to concerns about conflicts of interest. It could be that members are providing oversight on decisions that they made when Ministers.

There needs to be a demonstration of openness and transparency. There needs to be a fundamental review. The ISC needs to be led by those who are above all potential charges of conflicts of interest, which means, I am afraid to say, not the current members of the ISC.

One proposal suggests a discussion in Parliament about what sort of agency should be taking the issue forward and I think it should be parliamentary. The initial discussion could come through a Speaker’s Conference, in which all parties are brought together to examine the options available. The chosen option needs to have independence, resources and expertise and must be as open and as transparent as possible, while also avoiding conflicts of interest.

[Mr George Howarth]

I speak as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Can my hon. Friend provide an example of such a conflict of interest?

[John McDonnell]

That is the problem. Who knows? I do not know what the Intelligence and Security Committee does half the time, because half the time it is not exposed to the public. We cannot determine whether a conflict of interest has occurred or whether—

[Mr George Howarth]

We publish reports.

[John McDonnell]

I am afraid that, as has been demonstrated previously, the ISC did not know half the things that were going on until it read The Guardian. Confidence in the way forward needs restoring and that should come through a frank discussion led by Parliament. That is why I suggest a Speaker’s Conference to bring the relevant parties together with the expertise to develop a way forward that can establish the structures, procedures and legal basis on which to rebuild the confidence in our oversight over intelligence and security in this country and some parliamentary and democratic control over it.

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) on securing the debate, which has been helpful in several ways. First, it allows us to reflect on the changing nature of communication in our society; these days, the best way of achieving secure communication is probably to send an open postcard rather than putting it on Facebook.

Secondly, the debate enables us to correct the slightly partial accounts of the current state of things such as article 8 of the European convention on human rights. The hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) correctly quoted the section relating to the right to private correspondence, but he left out the second half, which refers to exemptions for national security and the fighting of crime.

Thirdly, the debate allows us to correct a few of the really inaccurate assertions in the wider debate, such as the one about the presentation on “Mastering the internet” that was portrayed as some Orwellian plot to dominate cyberspace when it was actually about enabling people to use search engines better. Much nonsense has been talked in the wider debate, but the issues are serious.

I must declare an obvious constituency and family interest in this debate. My parents both worked at GCHQ and, before that, at Bletchley Park. My father, Don Horwood, was involved, under Tommy Flowers, in building Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer. He was one of the people who kept it secret for decades, enabling the Americans, God help us, to take credit in the meantime for building the first electronic programmable computer.

My mother went back to Bletchley Park with me only recently, after 60 years’ absence. Only then did she reveal to me that she had not just been a linguist, as I had always thought, but had interpreted intelligence as well. The habit of keeping secret things that need to remain secret is one of the enormous debts we owe that generation of code breakers.

That continued in GCHQ during the cold war. We cannot know about all the secret victories our intelligence services won then, and are winning now, because they must, quite properly, remain secret. If we cast too much sunlight on some of these things, they stop working; it is not so much that we would always endanger agents’ lives, as that talking too much in public about precise techniques and sources makes those sources disappear and those techniques more difficult to apply. That endangers people in different ways.

I would love to think that we had entered a safe post-war world, where that level of secrecy was unnecessary, but that is simply not the case. We still face hostile states and hostile state intelligence services. Frankly, if the cyber-attacks and counter-attacks going on now took place in some physical realm, they would, in some instances, almost constitute an act of war. Some states are certainly engaged in hostile activity towards this country, but there are also the new threats of terrorist networks and organised crime.

It is not only the threats but the technology that is changing. We cannot make it childishly simple for those who would do us harm to evade surveillance. We must move with the times, and we must give our intelligence services the capability, under proper oversight, to access the communications they need to access.

Of course, much of the discussion is about when access crosses the line into surveillance. A lot is said, and a lot of allegations are made, about mass surveillance, but if it was really taking place, it would—apart from being wildly impractical—be straightforwardly illegal. In his statement to the House, the Foreign Secretary made it clear that he still regarded the situation in this way:

“To intercept the content of any individual’s communications in the UK requires a warrant signed personally by me, the Home Secretary, or by another Secretary of State…Warrants are legally required to be necessary, proportionate and carefully targeted, and we judge them on that basis.”

He added that all those authorisations were

“subject to independent review by an Intelligence Services Commissioner and an Interception of Communications Commissioner, both of whom must have held high judicial office and report directly to the Prime Minister.”—[Official Report, 10 June 2013; Vol. 564, c. 32.]

As Members have pointed out, we have a sophisticated system of democratic oversight. The Labour Government passed the Intelligence Services Act in 1994, establishing the Intelligence and Security Committee. RIPA has been referred to. The coalition’s Justice and Security Act 2013 became law only in April, further refining and defining that Committee’s responsibilities.

There is a degree of anger at GCHQ and among my constituents. People at GCHQ understand that there will inevitably be some misunderstanding of what they do, because it is not very public, and that there may be some naivety and inaccuracy. However, they find it difficult to forgive the accusations of bad faith and illegality. Their perception is that they operate under one of the most exacting sets of laws and systems of ministerial and independent oversight applied to any intelligence agency anywhere in the world.

Of course, there are things that will remain secret, and there are things that are done that would surprise us if they became public. Hon. Members have referred to the interception of Angela Merkel’s mobile phone communications by the NSA. I find that very surprising, although anyone who knows West German intelligence history will know that the Federal Chancellor’s office has not always been the most secure place. I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) could find similar stories of insecurity in unexpected places.

Of course, Angela Merkel’s intelligence agency—the Bundesnachrichtendienst—employs 6,000 people and has a sophisticated electronic capability, so I would be amazed if she, even with her East German background and the obvious sensitivities that go with that, was as surprised at what has been going on as she has made out in public.

[John McDonnell]

Would the hon. Gentleman be surprised at this morning’s reports that the Pope was bugged as well? Is that a venial or a mortal sin?